Method and apparatus for validating and ranking resources for geographic mirroring

Abstract

Method and apparatus for validating and ranking of resources that may be switched between a primary system and one or more backup systems at a single site. One embodiment provides a method for ensuring accessibility of one or more disk units by a system, comprising: configuring a disk pool for the system; validating availability of the one or more disk units for the disk pool; verifying that the disk units are at the same site as the system, and selecting one or more valid disk units for the disk pool. The method may further comprise ranking of each disk unit for the disk pool and selecting one or more valid disk units for the disk pool according to ranking.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of the Invention [0002] The present invention generally relates to management of computer resources. More particularly, the present invention relates to configuration and accessibility of resources for resource pools that are physically disperse. [0003] 2. Description of Related Art [0004] Modern computer systems that service enterprise operations, such as sales or manufacturing operations of a large company, cannot tolerate long periods of unavailability. Disaster recovery has traditionally focused on unscheduled downtime due to, for example, power outages, natural disasters, site disasters, system hardware or software errors, application malfunctions and deliberate acts of sabotage. Unscheduled downtime has usually resulted in unavailability of computer resources so that backup systems from a remote recovery site could be used to restore operations. The business interruption may be many hours or even days. [0005] Modern electronic commer...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0013] Generally, embodiments of the invention provide systems and methods for use in computing system groups that maintained redundant resources at geographically disperse locations in order to, for example, increase availability of the entire computing system group. The resources, such as disk units in disk pools, that are maintained at each site, are able to be switched between a primary system and one or more backup systems at a site. Each separate geographic location is referred to as a “site.” The primary system, any backup system(s) and one or more resources that are located a given site are able to be configured in a cluster to provide improved availability at that site. A cluster is defined as a group of systems or nodes that located at a site or distributed among multiple sites, where the nodes work together as a single system. Each computer system in the cluster is called a cluster node. Each site within the computing system group is able to have one or more computing system or nodes and the operation of the exemplary embodiments allows a site to operate with only one node. Each site in the computer system group is able to be configured as a production site, which contains the primary resources that are used for current operations, or as a mirror site, which contains redundant resources that mirror the primary resources located at the production site. The exemplary embodiments of the present invention facilitate proper validation and ranking of resources at a site for use by a cluster or computer nodes at that site. A set of interfaces is provided for creating, adding, changing, and deleting nodes in a cluster at a site.

Problems solved by technology

Modern computer systems that service enterprise operations, such as sales or manufacturing operations of a large company, cannot tolerate long periods of unavailability.

Unscheduled downtime has usually resulted in unavailability of computer resources so that backup systems from a remote recovery site could be used to restore operations.

The business interruption may be many hours or even days.

These scheduled downtimes introduce disruption into the operation of the system and are also difficult to accommodate.

These systems generally maintain redundant resources, such as data storage units, that contain duplicates of a primary resource.

Otherwise, the disk pool may not be available for the primary system and / or the backup system when a switchover is attempted or when a failover occurs.

However, due to the complexity of the configuration and hardware placement rules, the user may be forced into a trial and error situation, resulting in unavailable disk units when a switchover occurs.

Conventional computer resource groups generally require all nodes and resources to be collocated so that all nodes in the computer resource group have access to all resources allocated to the computer resource group, thereby limiting the flexibility of computer resource groups.

Images